Non-consensus and right

Warren Buffet, talking about investment decisions with big pay-offs, mentions that the decisions need to be ‘non-consensus and right’.

Peter Thiel, in his book Zero to One, phrases this slightly differently by asking “What is the thing that you believe is true…

Don’t half-ass it

Yesterday, I was driving on the road and I noticed this at the backside of the bus that was in front of me:

“If you are on the bus priority lane and you are able to read this, then you are on the wrong lane.”

Winners

Winners are rare.

Unicorn startups, top sports players, successful Youtube creators, Nobel laureates. They are all rare.

By looking only at winners in order to learn from them, we are succumbing to the survivorship bias. We don’t know of all the others that…

Controlling Inputs

Inputs are the things that we control — how we approach a situation, the due diligence that we do, the preparation and the effort we put in, the thoroughness we bring.

Outputs are a function of the inputs and some extrinsic variables that we do not control — luck…

The Amazon Press Release

Amazon is famous for it’s practice of writing a press release for a product or a feature even before a single line of code is written towards building it.

The idea behind this is to encourage product managers to think vividly about what problems the feature…

Moonshots

One of the many quotes by Homer Simpson is, “We haven’t tried anything and we’re all out of ideas!”

We shoot down our ideas all the time. We do it even before we consider it as a possibility.

Small Increments

Small increments don’t seem noticeable from one day to the next.

But, over a longer period of time, they compound and the change over this period can be significant.

On the flip side, small decrements work the same way.

Environments

Streets in Indian cities appear chaotic when compared to streets in Europe. The traffic patterns seem impossible to navigate on Indian streets when seen through the eyes of a European.

However, there are millions of people who successfully navigate these very streets every day.

What you can do

John F. Kennedy’s historic words, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country,” challenged every American to contribute in some way to the public good.

His inaugural address inspired children and adults to see the importance of civic…